When billionaires buy the press, they buy the referee. One man owns the Washington Post, another bought Twitter outright, and both purchases coincided with political ambitions that benefited from controlling the narrative. Nieman Lab and others have tracked how concentrated media ownership narrows what gets covered and how. Once the people with the most to lose from scrutiny own the institutions doing the scrutinizing, democracy is just theater with good lighting. A fortune that can purchase the public square stops being a reward for innovation. It becomes a veto over the truth.
0 comments